Do we really have so much influence today? We had significant economic influence after WWII because we were the only advanced country that didn't have our factories bombed to hell, and we had a business friendly culture. Today, the rest of the world has rebuilt their economic infrastructure, and much of the rest of the world is catching up on infrastructure, thanks to US capital dollars. Combine that with the fact that much of Asia has an even harder-working culture, and the fact that the US has grown lazier thanks to generations of wealth (the fear of REAL poverty is a powerful motivator, and we lost it), and I see a world where the US has increasingly smaller relative influence.
We will likely remain the most influential in the foreseeable future, but instead of having 10 times the impact of anyone else, it may only be twice the impact... We will keep getting wealthier as long as we have a risk-taking entrepreneurial spirit, but the rest of the world will keep getting relatively closer.
IANAAP, my point was just that anyone who has experienced vertigo or seen an optical illusion will know that you can't trust your brain to interpret visual data pertaining to things very large or small, very distant, or in some other way outside the range of experiences we encountered while evolving. I'm not saying our visual interpretation of such things is necessarily wrong, just that we shouldn't have a lot of confidence in it.
In principle, I love challenges to fundamental scientific theories--if they fail they strengthen the old theories, if they succeed then we have advanced our knowledge. There is no way to lose!
South Africa is larger (by population and by geography) than any country in Europe. It is also a Western country--English speaking, democratic, capital markets... it's not an Atoll at all (unless you consider France to be an Atoll, too).
Empiricism requires very few axioms. 1) you are not totally insane. 2) the physical universe exists. That's about it. You throw those out and any discussion about anything is moot.
My original post said knowledge is derived from evidence+logic. I have never contradicted that point. That point does not imply all actions are always based on knowledge. All people sometimes act on instinct or even guesswork. We work under assumptions that may not be founded in knowledge. You can't seem to get it through your head that people can have varying levels of confidence in any given idea.
As to the historical definitions of empiricism and rationalism: yes, I am aware of them. No, they don't matter in a discussion of the modern definitions.
It was pretty absurd that americans could stay at a top hotel in europe for the price of a Motel 6 back home. The dollar adjustment seems like a long overdue correction.
That's an outright lie. Please read anything about the philosophy of science, and contrast it with dogmatism.
I think cognitive dissonance is believing that throughout history all human behavior has been dominated by irrational beliefs, except for 21st century atheists.
That's a strawman argument. Empiricists don't think they are 100% free from irrational beliefs. The difference between the empirically minded and everyone else is the fact that empiricists are they only ones who try to be free from irrational beliefs.
You are not a real scientist if you knowingly believe things simply because they make you feel good. If you had been raised in some other time or culture, you would be telling me the bible is wrong and whatever collection of dogma you were raised with is right. The bible is a collection of common sense and fiction. It's not at all surprising that the common sense wisdom helps you with your life, but you don't need to believe the fiction to benefit from the common sense.
Some scientists overstate their confidence in certain theories, therefore there is a god? Is that the distilled version of what you just said? You fail. Nice false dichotomy, though.
I would challenge you to present credible evidence for or against any belief in
You fail at elementary logic. Go directly back to college. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
There is exactly as much evidence supporting the existence of an after life as there is evidence supporting the doctrines of Scientology. I don't have to prove either is false to dismiss them as unlikely to the extreme. Prove to me there isn't an invisible unicorn in my attic.
Seriously. Take at least one course in logic before you die.
You just said you believe things are true only because that belief make you feel good. What kind of science do you practice? Sociology?
Personally, for unanswered questions, I would rather say "I don't know" than make something up or follow something somebody else made up. It's the only way I could look at myself in the mirror without seeing a liar looking back at me.
And you love your wife because your brain has evolved to like monogamy. Couples are more likely to raise successful offspring... at least that theory is consistent with the evidence at hand and research is ongoing. Try reading on evolutionary psychology.
Actually, every person who believes in a creation story really is basing this belief solely on dogma. There is absolutely no evidence supporting any of the supernatural claims in any of the genesis myths of any of the worlds' religions. None.
Scientists believe knowledge comes from evidence and the logical conclusions derivable from that evidence. Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
The so called "moderate" religious people exist in a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance" whereby all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith. This is your textbook dogma.
Don't take a textbook definition of dogma and call it anything else. That's really disingenuous of you.
This money doesn't belong to the execs of Microsoft. It belongs to the shareholders of MSFT. Corvettes don't appreciate and don't pay dividends, so unless every shareholder gets to take it for a spin, they can't spend that money on sports cars.
The best benefit of virtualization is essentially free disaster recovery plans.
By the way, crackers break DRM, Hackers break security. Alternatively, crackers is a slang term for caucasians, and hackers is a slang term for golfers.
getting drunk can make you optimistic - it would be interesting to study the effects of alcohol on that region of the brain. If that portion of the brain could be stimulated in some other way it could lead to a powerful new series of drugs to battle depression
CNBC Talking Head: And in today's business news, drug maker Merck has started Phase III trials of its new depression medications: tequila, scotch, vodka, gin, and rum. Generic drug manufacturers have already begun investigations into marketing their competing product, Maddog 20/20.
I know you're joking, but direct stimulation of this point might cure depression. People don't commit suicide because they are unhappy. They commit suicide because they are unhappy and they don't think they will ever be happy again--a lack of optimism.
I can imagine a future where some people have optimism pacemakers--it's probably better than drugs.
Unwilling to participate? YOU sure as hell are willing to participate because you use the fruits of society. If you don't want to contribute to society, trash everything you can't build yourself from wood and go live with the Amish. Wait--the Amish are using our hospitals, today--hospitals almost entirely staffed by physicians from the public education system. They should be paying taxes, too.
Before public education, there actually WAS a permanent underclass. I'm sure 99% of parents today consider themselves smart enough teach their children everything they need to know, but very few of them actually could.
Public education is the primary force of social mobility in our society. Social mobility causes optimism. Optimism causes ambition. Ambition causes productivity. Productivity causes our amazing economy where nobody starves despite only a few men and machines actually working the farms! You really must not know what life was like for the average person before everyone, no matter how poor, had a chance to be educated. You don't want that. I promise. A few rare people can teach themselves only from books, but most can not.
Also, your claim that there are no creative and brilliant minds is just not true. Most of the time, truly great thinkers are not fully recognized until after their deaths. String/M-brane theory is a popular example of a concept which requires math more complex and thinking more creative than Einstein. We don't know how "true" it is yet, but it is the complete opposite of "cog in the machine" thinking.
I agree that much of our public education system is still excessively geared toward the industrial age, but it still outweighs the alternative system a billion to one. And that industrial thinking is changing, too. While I attended PUBLIC university, I was involved in a program that taught PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL students how do design and build robots. Design is the height of creativity. It's not just cogs, anymore.
Disclaimer: I am not a Ph.D economist, but I'm dating one. She says that part of Smith's role for governments, facilitating commerce, is widely interpreted to include education. A population which is illiterate and unable to do math will certainly add some inefficiency to a market. That's one whopper of an understatement, by the way.
That said, Smith is famous for being first, not for being infallible. She has pointed out to me (when defending an EU law mandating returns for flawed consumer goods) that the market Smith described does not exist today; the complexity of modern goods, for example, makes it extremely difficult for purchasers to adequately evaluate the quality of many types of products.
By the way, the topic at hand is the value of public education, not some specific incident of government corruption.
Also, I should note that there are many other reasons to fund education, apart from direct economic improvement. Since decisions about whether to be educated are made by parents, not children, a lack of public education would lead to a permanent underclass, and is entirely contrary to the principles of meritocracy (an almost universally cherished western value).
One more thing: Education is essential for a democracy, because the people run the government. If the majority are idiots, then idiots run the country.
Well, considering you provide no evidence in support of your economic theory* (which we might call "extremist free market fundamentalism"), whereas nobel laureate economists have piles of research supporting their own theories, the reasonable person must side with them over you.
You may be interested to know that Adam Smith, who coined the phrase "invisible hand," and is considered the preliminary thinker on capitalist theory, was a strong proponent of government investment in economic infrastructure, such as public education.
* Anecdotes are meaningless in a discussion of macroeconomic theory. That's why there's a "macro" in the word.
In theory, sales taxes pay for the infrastructure that enables commerce. When someone shoplifts, the sales taxes pay for the officers who investigate and prosecute the crime, and for the jails that follow.
Some sales taxes are also used to pay for public works which are intended to attract more commerce to an area.
The idea of "redistributing wealth" via "consumption tax" is behind sales tax in some areas. Whether this is a valid use is really a discussion for philosophers and economists.
There is honestly NOTHING that government does that could not be BETTER handled by a local business or a local coalition.
There are some nobel prize winning economists who disagree with you. You're falling in to a trap called "reductionism," where we want simple answers, so we oversimplify to the point of being wrong.
Also, you DO use the public education system. If it weren't for public education, the US wouldn't even HAVE the economy that enables you to earn the money to buy the computer you are typing on. If it weren't for public education, your income would likely decrease by an amount FAR GREATER than what is currently spent on taxes.
In other words, your rant is just factually incorrect in multiple ways.
In the event of a bank run, only checking/savings accounts could be hard to redeem. Stocks and bonds can't simply vanish in a puff of fractional-reserve magic. In that way, these items really do represent real wealth.
Personally, I only keep about a month of expenses in the bank. Everything else goes directly to the investment brokerage. I expect my investment dividends to exceed my personal income from work in about 15 years. If I kept everything I earn in "physical" goods, as you suggest, that would never be possible. Good luck railing against the evils of the monetary system, though. Just remember, nobody is stopping you from profiting from it yourself. Bank of America stock pays dividends of almost 5%!
Also, you have no argument from me for saying property tax is sometimes used inefficiently, but calling it rent is dishonest.
When you said "rent," I think you actually meant "fees necessary to provide essential services, including fire-fighting, police protection, and an educated local population."
Also, I would love to see you tell Warren Buffet that his portfolio is worthless because stock certificates aren't "real, tangible, physical goods."
If prison decreases his likelihood of spreading his genes, epigenes, or memes, he has failed in the modern evolutionary sense.
I'm guessing it is hard to find fertile women in prison, and even harder to pass on your own stupid ideas to your children if they exist, since you only see them for an hour per week.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we really have so much influence today? We had significant economic influence after WWII because we were the only advanced country that didn't have our factories bombed to hell, and we had a business friendly culture. Today, the rest of the world has rebuilt their economic infrastructure, and much of the rest of the world is catching up on infrastructure, thanks to US capital dollars. Combine that with the fact that much of Asia has an even harder-working culture, and the fact that the US has grown lazier thanks to generations of wealth (the fear of REAL poverty is a powerful motivator, and we lost it), and I see a world where the US has increasingly smaller relative influence.
We will likely remain the most influential in the foreseeable future, but instead of having 10 times the impact of anyone else, it may only be twice the impact... We will keep getting wealthier as long as we have a risk-taking entrepreneurial spirit, but the rest of the world will keep getting relatively closer.
IANAAP, my point was just that anyone who has experienced vertigo or seen an optical illusion will know that you can't trust your brain to interpret visual data pertaining to things very large or small, very distant, or in some other way outside the range of experiences we encountered while evolving. I'm not saying our visual interpretation of such things is necessarily wrong, just that we shouldn't have a lot of confidence in it.
In principle, I love challenges to fundamental scientific theories--if they fail they strengthen the old theories, if they succeed then we have advanced our knowledge. There is no way to lose!
Your eyes and brain did not evolve to observe cosmic phenomena.
South Africa is larger (by population and by geography) than any country in Europe. It is also a Western country--English speaking, democratic, capital markets... it's not an Atoll at all (unless you consider France to be an Atoll, too).
Empiricism requires very few axioms. 1) you are not totally insane. 2) the physical universe exists. That's about it. You throw those out and any discussion about anything is moot.
My original post said knowledge is derived from evidence+logic. I have never contradicted that point. That point does not imply all actions are always based on knowledge. All people sometimes act on instinct or even guesswork. We work under assumptions that may not be founded in knowledge. You can't seem to get it through your head that people can have varying levels of confidence in any given idea.
As to the historical definitions of empiricism and rationalism: yes, I am aware of them. No, they don't matter in a discussion of the modern definitions.
Yes, and 29% vs gold and 46% vs moon rock.
It was pretty absurd that americans could stay at a top hotel in europe for the price of a Motel 6 back home. The dollar adjustment seems like a long overdue correction.
You are not a real scientist if you knowingly believe things simply because they make you feel good. If you had been raised in some other time or culture, you would be telling me the bible is wrong and whatever collection of dogma you were raised with is right. The bible is a collection of common sense and fiction. It's not at all surprising that the common sense wisdom helps you with your life, but you don't need to believe the fiction to benefit from the common sense.
Some scientists overstate their confidence in certain theories, therefore there is a god? Is that the distilled version of what you just said? You fail. Nice false dichotomy, though.
You fail at elementary logic. Go directly back to college. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
There is exactly as much evidence supporting the existence of an after life as there is evidence supporting the doctrines of Scientology. I don't have to prove either is false to dismiss them as unlikely to the extreme. Prove to me there isn't an invisible unicorn in my attic.
Seriously. Take at least one course in logic before you die.
You just said you believe things are true only because that belief make you feel good. What kind of science do you practice? Sociology?
Personally, for unanswered questions, I would rather say "I don't know" than make something up or follow something somebody else made up. It's the only way I could look at myself in the mirror without seeing a liar looking back at me.
And you love your wife because your brain has evolved to like monogamy. Couples are more likely to raise successful offspring... at least that theory is consistent with the evidence at hand and research is ongoing. Try reading on evolutionary psychology.
Actually, every person who believes in a creation story really is basing this belief solely on dogma. There is absolutely no evidence supporting any of the supernatural claims in any of the genesis myths of any of the worlds' religions. None.
Scientists believe knowledge comes from evidence and the logical conclusions derivable from that evidence.
Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
The so called "moderate" religious people exist in a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance" whereby all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith. This is your textbook dogma.
Don't take a textbook definition of dogma and call it anything else. That's really disingenuous of you.
This money doesn't belong to the execs of Microsoft. It belongs to the shareholders of MSFT. Corvettes don't appreciate and don't pay dividends, so unless every shareholder gets to take it for a spin, they can't spend that money on sports cars.
The best benefit of virtualization is essentially free disaster recovery plans.
By the way, crackers break DRM, Hackers break security. Alternatively, crackers is a slang term for caucasians, and hackers is a slang term for golfers.
I know you're joking, but direct stimulation of this point might cure depression. People don't commit suicide because they are unhappy. They commit suicide because they are unhappy and they don't think they will ever be happy again--a lack of optimism.
I can imagine a future where some people have optimism pacemakers--it's probably better than drugs.
Unwilling to participate? YOU sure as hell are willing to participate because you use the fruits of society. If you don't want to contribute to society, trash everything you can't build yourself from wood and go live with the Amish. Wait--the Amish are using our hospitals, today--hospitals almost entirely staffed by physicians from the public education system. They should be paying taxes, too.
Before public education, there actually WAS a permanent underclass. I'm sure 99% of parents today consider themselves smart enough teach their children everything they need to know, but very few of them actually could.
Public education is the primary force of social mobility in our society. Social mobility causes optimism. Optimism causes ambition. Ambition causes productivity. Productivity causes our amazing economy where nobody starves despite only a few men and machines actually working the farms! You really must not know what life was like for the average person before everyone, no matter how poor, had a chance to be educated. You don't want that. I promise. A few rare people can teach themselves only from books, but most can not.
Also, your claim that there are no creative and brilliant minds is just not true. Most of the time, truly great thinkers are not fully recognized until after their deaths. String/M-brane theory is a popular example of a concept which requires math more complex and thinking more creative than Einstein. We don't know how "true" it is yet, but it is the complete opposite of "cog in the machine" thinking.
I agree that much of our public education system is still excessively geared toward the industrial age, but it still outweighs the alternative system a billion to one. And that industrial thinking is changing, too. While I attended PUBLIC university, I was involved in a program that taught PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL students how do design and build robots. Design is the height of creativity. It's not just cogs, anymore.
Disclaimer: I am not a Ph.D economist, but I'm dating one. She says that part of Smith's role for governments, facilitating commerce, is widely interpreted to include education. A population which is illiterate and unable to do math will certainly add some inefficiency to a market. That's one whopper of an understatement, by the way.
That said, Smith is famous for being first, not for being infallible. She has pointed out to me (when defending an EU law mandating returns for flawed consumer goods) that the market Smith described does not exist today; the complexity of modern goods, for example, makes it extremely difficult for purchasers to adequately evaluate the quality of many types of products.
By the way, the topic at hand is the value of public education, not some specific incident of government corruption.
Also, I should note that there are many other reasons to fund education, apart from direct economic improvement. Since decisions about whether to be educated are made by parents, not children, a lack of public education would lead to a permanent underclass, and is entirely contrary to the principles of meritocracy (an almost universally cherished western value).
One more thing: Education is essential for a democracy, because the people run the government. If the majority are idiots, then idiots run the country.
Well, considering you provide no evidence in support of your economic theory* (which we might call "extremist free market fundamentalism"), whereas nobel laureate economists have piles of research supporting their own theories, the reasonable person must side with them over you.
You may be interested to know that Adam Smith, who coined the phrase "invisible hand," and is considered the preliminary thinker on capitalist theory, was a strong proponent of government investment in economic infrastructure, such as public education.
* Anecdotes are meaningless in a discussion of macroeconomic theory. That's why there's a "macro" in the word.
In theory, sales taxes pay for the infrastructure that enables commerce. When someone shoplifts, the sales taxes pay for the officers who investigate and prosecute the crime, and for the jails that follow.
Some sales taxes are also used to pay for public works which are intended to attract more commerce to an area.
The idea of "redistributing wealth" via "consumption tax" is behind sales tax in some areas. Whether this is a valid use is really a discussion for philosophers and economists.
Also, you DO use the public education system. If it weren't for public education, the US wouldn't even HAVE the economy that enables you to earn the money to buy the computer you are typing on. If it weren't for public education, your income would likely decrease by an amount FAR GREATER than what is currently spent on taxes.
In other words, your rant is just factually incorrect in multiple ways.
In the event of a bank run, only checking/savings accounts could be hard to redeem. Stocks and bonds can't simply vanish in a puff of fractional-reserve magic. In that way, these items really do represent real wealth.
Personally, I only keep about a month of expenses in the bank. Everything else goes directly to the investment brokerage. I expect my investment dividends to exceed my personal income from work in about 15 years. If I kept everything I earn in "physical" goods, as you suggest, that would never be possible. Good luck railing against the evils of the monetary system, though. Just remember, nobody is stopping you from profiting from it yourself. Bank of America stock pays dividends of almost 5%!
Also, you have no argument from me for saying property tax is sometimes used inefficiently, but calling it rent is dishonest.
When you said "rent," I think you actually meant "fees necessary to provide essential services, including fire-fighting, police protection, and an educated local population."
Also, I would love to see you tell Warren Buffet that his portfolio is worthless because stock certificates aren't "real, tangible, physical goods."
You know you're a bit of a kook, don't you?
If prison decreases his likelihood of spreading his genes, epigenes, or memes, he has failed in the modern evolutionary sense.
I'm guessing it is hard to find fertile women in prison, and even harder to pass on your own stupid ideas to your children if they exist, since you only see them for an hour per week.